Seems like a good idea at the moment:
Last month I wrote about an eye-opening History Today article on the 1700 Industrial Revolution. The author showed with numbers that England didn’t become MORE industrial during those centuries. What expanded was the financial sector. England offshored its food and concentrated more on banking. The FORM of industry changed for sure, but England was already an important manufacturer.
I’ve also noted that printing was the first mass production, with a long head start on the others. This isn’t a new thought; printing has been part of my mindset since I worked in printshops in the 70s, and I’ve done several tech history pieces on various sides of printing.
We normally say that printing helped to spread industrialization because it spread the writings of economists and philosophers like Locke and Adam Smith.
BUT: Those dudes were not engineers. They said very little about materials and methods. Even in the 20th century it was hard to find books about the details of production. Dictionaries didn’t cover the jargon of trades.
Production changed and grew the old way, hand to hand inside the trades and guilds. One company figured out an improved method to make guns or reapers, and its competitors had to scramble to keep up. They either reverse-engineered or spied or hired people away from the first company to develop similar or better methods. Printing itself spread by word of hand. Gutenberg kept his skills strictly secret until a fire destroyed his shop. His workers then swarmed all over Europe and started their own printshops.
So: Printing brought the concept of mechanized mass production into the world of trades, and it started spreading inside that world.
Polistra's Mill 